Sally Ann McIntyre

Artist Photo
Sally is facing away from the camera. She is on the dry rocks beside a river. She is playing an accordian
Artist Bio Text

Sally Ann Mcintyre (1974, NZ/AU) is a Melbourne/Naarm based radio and sound artist, researcher and writer, who has been working artistically with small-scale radio transmission since 2006. Twin signals at Silver Stream (fragments of a landscape for specimens #50766 & #50767) extends a  series of sound and radio art works she has been performing and exhibiting since 2012, which strategically utilise early recording and transmitting media such as wax cylinders, music boxes, and small-radius radio, to reveal the relationship of historical sound archives to cultural extinction narratives, and to consider extinction as a form of non-representational trauma, erasure, silence and silencing within the settler-colonial landscape. This suite of works draws variously on research and investigations into the sound and silence of birds in historic accounts of species extinction and moves between the museum collection and the field, connecting threads within the economic, social and cultural relations of colonial Aotearoa/New Zealand, and constructing a poetic economy of loss from fragments and inexactitudes. Investigations are conducted on the border between empirical fieldwork and performative site-specific art practice, in which small-radius radio transmission and sound recording function as a set of tools through which to enact forms of witnessing and/or sonic repatriation. Within these investigations, the archival materiality of modernist sound and transmission technologies is also approached as a haunted landscape, one whose afterlives can function critically to overlay the visible, in order to elucidate the aesthetics and politics of memory, revealing absent presences otherwise empirically intangible within sites.